Date: Thu, 28 Aug 1997 17:43:48 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ATT Unix for Windows ! Message-ID: <19970828174348.17499@lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <19970828083703.OY21311@uriah.heep.sax.de>; from J Wunsch on Thu, Aug 28, 1997 at 08:37:03AM %2B0200 References: <199708251245.WAA23142@oznet11.ozemail.com.au> <19970825204932.12036@grendel.IAEhv.nl> <34020362.7DB1@fps.biblos.unal.edu.co> <19970825224258.55928@grendel.IAEhv.nl> <19970826083051.FR52594@uriah.heep.sax.de> <19970826235525.22143@grendel.IAEhv.nl> <19970827093336.NX00626@uriah.heep.sax.de> <19970828002532.43939@grendel.IAEhv.nl> <19970828083703.OY21311@uriah.heep.sax.de>
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On Thu, Aug 28, 1997 at 08:37:03AM +0200, J Wunsch wrote:
> As Peter Korsten wrote:
>
>> Er, that's actually what I did. :) I put the objects files in a
>> '.for' loop. I wanted something like '*.c' but it wouldn't work.
>
> SRCS!= echo *.c
>
> (But that's BSD make, alas.)
There are similar constructs available for other makes.
>> It's not really more complicated, it's more work. I have to make
>> a seperate Makefile (with the chance of errors) and edit that
>> when I add a file to my project.
>
> I consider auto-adding each new file fairly dangerous. I often drop
> files like `foo.c' in my workspace where i have been testing
> something.
I would guess that Peter hasn't understood the power of make.
>> Why did you write your own keybaord mapping? Wasn't there a
>> suitable mapping available?
>
> There wasn't.
>
>> There certainly is a German keyboard
>> mapping for Windows.
>
> Sure. The German keyboard has been designed by a typist, not by a
> hacker. How else could they have laid out the {[]}'s in a way where
> you break your fingers? The consequence is that most hackers simply
> avoid German keyboards at all, and use US-ASCII ones. But they fail
> to write texts with German umlauts on them. My mapping allows for
> both.
Round about here we begin to see the divergence of your views. Peter
wants a standard, no matter how bad. Jörg wants a tool that he can
use. No trouble guessing which side I'm on :-)
>> Talking about desktops: I have a very personal desktop with NT,
>> that looks totally different from what everybody else uses at the
>> office. (For the insiders: color scheme Rainy Day, background Blue
>> Monday, automatically hiding taskbar on top, small icons, and
>> shortcuts to all drives on my desktop, together with Netscape and
>> the mandatory icons.)
Wow. How many components of this desktop originated outside NT?
>> Isn't it a bit strange that
>> the configuration of most X-applications is done in a text file?
>
> What else? Some piece of binary junk that can only be maintained by
> that very program itself? Store the layout in a bitmap?
Peter, what's strange about it? It's one of the cleverest things they
could have done. Read on...
> No, the only problem with this is that the authors of most X11
> software didn't think of adding a knob to allow you editing them
> without using a text editor.
Is that a problem? They supplied a format which *can* easily be used
by other applications. Megaslop, by comparison, stores the
information in proprietary format binary files. Theoretically you
could save a few bytes by doing this (that was the argument I always
used for doing it this way, anyway :-), but in practice I'd guess that
Megaslop config files are larger even than the biggest X app-defaults
files.
The disadvantages of the binary files are obvious when you think about
it: you need special programs to access them. I've never seen any
such file which can store comments. The typical Megaslop config
program shows you lots of "card file" menus, which effectively makes
it impossible to keep an overview. Never mind that computers have
replaced card files and the like--thanks to Megaslop, we still have
their restrictions.
> Things like CDE show that it can be done. Or Netscape. Still, it's
> plain text files, but who cares? (I wouldn't even be sure any
> longer for Netscape.)
As far as I can see, all Netscrape parameters are stored in
app-defaults/Netscape. Not a small file, BTW:
$ ls -l /usr/X11/lib/X11/app-defaults/Netscape
-r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 219960 Aug 17 14:55 /usr/X11/lib/X11/app-defaults/Netscape
On the other hand, over half is comments, and you can use it to
configure Netscrape without any other documentation. Show me how to
do that with a Megaslop config file, even the text ones.
> The worst abonimation DOS/Windows came up with is IMHO a ``text
> system'' that uses binary junk files, incompatible even to itself,
> unintelligible for anybody else. They probably call this
> ``marketing'', i know.
I would suggest that they call it "protection of market share".
>> X is not a real graphical user interface as Windows is. Many
>
> Define `real'. X11 is a windows environment, nothing else. The
> toolkits have to be provided separately.
Sure. X is modular. Megaslop Windows is a monolith. Windows are
things to let light (and maybe air) into buildings.
>> applications are tty-oriented applications with extra X-support.
Some are. Others aren't. Don't forget that character-oriented
applications offer you a flexibility that no GUI can possibly offer.
One of the biggest mistakes in the Megaslop environment is that this
flexibility has been discarded because it's more difficult to learn.
> But that's hardly the failure of X. It's the failure of those people
> who've been using their old tty-mode programs, and wrapped them up
> into X11.
That applies only to some of them. There are plenty of GUI
applications in the Ports Collection. The thing is, most FreeBSD
users don't use them because they don't buy them anything.
>> When - not if - the moment arrives that NT is as capable as Unix,
>> you'll see that the relative ease with which you can setup things
>> (you still need to know what you're doing, though) will give Unix
>> a very hard time.
>
> This has been threatened a while ago already. The tricky thing with
> NT (as i see it every day at our customers) is *not* to initially get
> it to fly. The tricky thing is to keep it running, and even know in a
> failure situation what it's doing, and how to repair. One of our
> customers started to send out packets to port 138 on a nonexistant
> address of our network a couple of days ago. This costs him DM 10
> each day, phone costs only. He doesn't even know why this happens,
> nor was he able to trace it down by now. I know it's his NT server,
> so i wasn't too surprised to see it happen... The initial disadvant-
> age with Unix, that you gotta learn quite a number of things before
> you are happy, quickly turns into an advantage once there's a problem:
> you know the ins and outs of your system, so you also know where to
> look if troubles appear.
Yup. There's no good way to represent errors graphically.
> I've seen many win users re-installing their systems quite a number
> of times. I couldn't imagine why i should re-install one of my
> systems. The machine at home even has migrated a number of disks
> already, without re-installation.
This is a habit that a lot of people get in to, even with FreeBSD. I
don't know how to explain to people that it's a bad idea.
Greg
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